


Personal Affects

by CrabOfDoom



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, Veer from Canon, What-If, canon character death, emotional stress, sentimental fixation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 15:06:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16286852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrabOfDoom/pseuds/CrabOfDoom
Summary: There is more inside of the old Shinra mansion, than dusty lab records and monsters





	Personal Affects

There would come a time for the Jenova Project, when theory became action. When action would lead to failure. When failure would lead to regrouping, to rethinking, and to try, try again. A time when success was finally at hand. At least, on paper.

A time when Lucrecia would walk the old path to the small shops and marketplace of the mountain village of Nibelheim, from the old opulent mansion on its outer reaches. When she would look at the young women and old women of the village, the mothers and stepmothers and grandmothers, and for the first time since her arrival, feel a common bond with them.

Lucrecia would have only known of her pregnancy for four days. She’d suspected for longer, but knowing with certainty was its own special brand of relief. It was tempting to prepare for her current condition before it was even confirmed, but there was nothing to be gained from hoarding supplies no one in the house could use, and perhaps years before those supplies would be of any service. Now, however, there was a rough timeline. Nine months to gather everything she’d need to keep a tiny life warm, comfortable, and fed.

It would sound like a long time, but even in her mid 20s, Lucrecia was well acquainted with how quickly time slipped away when she focused on her work. She’d made up her mind that she should procure whatever she could, as soon as she could. Nine months wasn’t an unreasonable length of time to store away the non-perishable things, when they were sure to be needed as soon as she would give birth.

There were no children in the mansion. Nothing on hand to be used as a stop-gap or be commandeered, outright. Where the heirlooms and relics of Shinra’s own infancy had gone, Lucrecia couldn’t begin to guess, but their absence in a house with more than enough rooms to dedicate one to a nursery made it clear that he was not a man to live in the past. Her baby would need everything.

A crib seemed the most logical place to start. Nibelheim had no shortage of residents skilled at working with the wood from the dense forests that surrounded them. It wouldn’t be difficult to find a suitable one, and cost was no object. Oddly enough, it would be a business expense, and covered by the mansion’s owner. A crib would have to be ready, as soon as the baby could leave the labs. Even if the crib would be in the labs for a while, there was no sense in having to work around a large chunk of furniture that wasn’t yet serving a purpose, so it would be best to keep it clean and safe in Lucrecia’s bedroom.

The villagers would want to know why she was buying it. “I’m expecting” was all she’d have to tell them. It was non-committal enough. Still enough to be met with happy gasps and congratulations, and word spreading throughout Nibelheim. Some merchants had things for her when she visited them next. Small things. A secondhand baby blanket here, a plain white onesie there, a simple, chubby cloth animal. These, too, were things with no present use in the labs. Best to keep them clean and safe inside the crib.

‘Have you thought of a name?’, several of the older women would ask. No, she’d tell them, she hasn’t been expecting long enough to give it much thought. A month later, they’d ask again. Lucrecia would smile and look down to her hands. For a girl, Jenova, she’d tell them. It seemed only right and respectful. For a boy, Sephiroth. One of the older women would take it upon herself to stitch up a small, rectangular pillow. Just enough for a baby’s head to rest against, just enough to give a baby’s arms something to squeeze as it slept. A little project to keep busy between her other work.

When Lucrecia would return the next month, she’d have news. My husband says we’re having a boy, she’d tell her. The older woman would smile for her, and hold up a hand to tell Lucrecia to wait. The woman would take a thick, silky floss–a pine green she’d been saving, to be ready for either instance–and in stitched dashes, she would add a name to the small pillow, and finally hand it over to Nibelheim’s newest mother-to-be. Lucrecia would feel tears threaten to well in her eyes as she looked at it. The gift is no greater nor lesser kindness than she’d been given before, but it would somehow, for the first time, make everything feel so real. She really was expecting. It really was going to be a boy. And he had a name. The pillow joins the rest of her preparations, inside the crib, but it stays at the front, where she can see it through the slats. Last thing at night, before she’d turn off the light and sleep. First thing in the morning, to keep her going forward.

The preparations, of course, would remain just that. The crib would never move from Lucrecia’s room. The small clothes would never be worn. The stuffed comforts, untouched. The baby would be premature by almost two months, and despite all outward signs of good health and full development, he would live out those months in an incubator. He would be far too valuable to risk anything less.

The villagers would never see the new mother, nor her child. Most would assume the pregnancy had been troubled, and she’d either needed a great deal of rest, or a funeral for two. It would remain an open-ended question, when the whole of the mansion’s inhabitants moved out and left for Midgar. In time, she would become a footnote of local oral history.

Two decades later, life would return to the mansion, but it would be no cause for celebration. Half of the people who had ever spoken to Lucrecia had died of illness, accident, or old age. The rest hadn’t heard her name in so long, that they’d need to hear it again, to remember it. That wouldn’t prevent them from staring a second longer than they should, at an imposingly tall young man with a familiar heart-shaped face and long bangs that seemed to stand on their own. But his silver hair, his green eyes, those would be something they’d surely never seen on anyone else before, and the sense of familiarity would drift away.

He’d come to take up residence in the mansion’s basement, among the books and equipment that the villagers never knew it contained. There, he’d find the name Jenova in abundance amid notes and reports that referenced his own name just as often. He’d reach the only conclusion available to him, that he was indeed nothing but the monstrous experiment he’d suspected himself to be.

A tiny spark in the back of his mind would still refuse to believe. Zack had been correct, inside the reactor: he looked nothing like the creatures they’d discovered in the pods. Save for his eyes, he looked human. Perfectly human, in fact. Even the notes confirming his creation had said as much. That would make it all the more confusing. How could one be perfect  _and_  a monstrosity? The burning need to know took a backseat to the fixation of unraveling this knot before he could continue. He would find himself back upstairs, in the mansion’s vast foyer, before he’d realize he ever left the basement’s library.

No one had entered the mansion after him. The lights hadn’t been been turned on. He’d doubt that they could be, in their state of disrepair. The lights didn’t matter. He’d never had trouble with seeing well in darkness. He’d often preferred it, for permitting his feline pupils to relax, rather than bright lights that forced them to stay tightly constricted. He’d remark to himself that he’d never once seen another human being with his same problem. It allowed his mind’s scale for the ‘monstrosity’ conclusion to gain weight.

Absently, he’d drag a finger along the keys of a sun-beaten grand piano. The aged strings would make strange, strained notes that managed at once to be both piercing and dulled. His eyes would drift over the walls, to artwork and photographs not deemed valuable enough to be vacated along with President Shinra, when he abandoned the mansion for his penthouse atop of Gaia’s largest male inadequacy joke. Most of the works were of creatures distorted in ways only antiquity could manage. Monsters. They further tipped the scales against his own humanity, to think he was just one more in a long line, that Shinra had been collecting for longer than he’d thought.

Still, the tiny spark wouldn’t be swayed.  _That isn’t you. You aren’t like them_. He couldn’t be sure those were even words Zack had said, but they were nevertheless a shred of hope to cling to.

He’d climbed the tattered grand stairs and ghosted his way between museums of dust that had once been bedrooms. Furniture remained, old-fashioned and heavy, while virtually every drawer, cabinet, and shelf had been emptied. It soon began to feel like he’d been sealed into a tomb that had been plundered ages ago. Mindless curiosity had turned to a search for any evidence of life, and with none to be found in so many of the countless rooms, that search had become almost desperate.

A small, unadorned metal hair comb, wedged upright between a drawer’s bottom and side was treated as gently as a if were blown glass, when he’d found it. It wasn’t right to take it, and so it would be placed back in the drawer, flat and in the center. It would be enough, that it merely proved that people had once lived here, and not merely the monsters and horrors that had been left behind in the labs’ corridors.

An unspeakably ugly silk tie would be found wadded up in the far corner of a wardrobe. A pen, nestled in the gap between base moldings and floorboards. The discarded rules card from a poker deck, in much the same place, behind a different room’s door. Opaque droplets of spray on a bathroom mirror, as though someone had brushed their teeth just before leaving, and no maid had ever returned to clean the glass again. Gross as it was, to ponder the viability of decades-old germs, the drops would be his greatest reassurance that he hadn’t wandered into some horrible dimension that chose to make his isolation painfully literal.

Only four doors he’d come to on the upper floor were closed. Only one was locked. It obviously didn’t know who it was dealing with. The knob was turned with a single, sharp twist, and broke to spin freely on its shaft. One solid push, and the brass catch carved a straight path cleanly through the strike plate and jamb.

The dust inside was noticeably thicker than in the other rooms. That would explain why this was the only room that still had its bed linens. It had been locked long before the desertion. Although modestly adorned, it appeared to be practically overflowing with personal affects, compared to the barren state of the rest of the house.

Twenty-five years before, there had been the first night when the room’s occupant hadn’t returned. After three weeks, Hojo stood in its open doorway. Something had to be done with Lucrecia’s things, as it became more and more apparent to his logical mind that she had crawled off somewhere to die. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t already been trying, over the final months of her pregnancy. Hojo supposed he could order the room packed up and stowed in the attic. But he didn’t. He supposed he could send someone into town, to tell the first villagers they came across, that they could help themselves to whatever caught their fancy. But he didn’t. Thoughts of moving the Turk’s coffin into this room briefly crossed his mind. That was a strong part of the reason the room now stood empty, after all. But he didn’t. His face felt hot from the absurdity of it all, but there was a strong reluctance to touch anything in the room, to set foot on the floor, to allow anyone else to do the same, lest a spell be broken and the woman prove herself to be some creature who would never re-inhabit a nest that’s been disturbed. In the end, Hojo opted to simply lock the door and walk away, back to his life’s work.

Twenty-five years later, a young man who’d been a war veteran for half his lifetime would stand in the same open doorway. His heart would race along with his mind, in an attempt to make sense of the sight before him. Of all the things to be left behind… Shinra took the gods-damned brooms and mops from the hall closets, but he didn’t take a small wooden jewelry box? Didn’t take a row of five monogrammed journals? He didn’t take a  _crib?_

The young soldier would slap his hand against the wall where a light switch should be, and growl at himself for forgetting that whatever electricity the house had once been wired for had been dead for years. He’d yank the glass chimney off of a hurricane lamp on a dressing table and wield a spark of his own magic to light the murky oil. The smell of burning dust as the wick blazed to life was not pleasant, but for this, he would need more light. Whether senior or junior, a Shinra had locked away and abandoned a childhood like he’d always been denied, and he needed to know why.

The contents of the jewelry box were clearly feminine. Necklaces of small pearls, large pearls, many pairs of earrings. Pastels, jewel tones, primaries, neons, precious metals… the lady liked color, there was no doubt of that. In a dressing table drawer, he’d find almost a dozen long, silk scarves, carefully wound flat and tucked away. He wasn’t sure what they were for, but further into the drawer, he found a brush with a few  _very_  long brown hairs weaving through its bristles. He’d have to pull one free to see just  _how_  long. It rivaled his own, and that was  _not_  a feat he saw often. He’d place the hair back on the brush, spare a heavy-hearted glance to the crib, and turn his attention to the most recent year of the journals.

He would’ve suspected the lady was Rufus’ deceased mother, but the journals’ monograms didn’t seem to fit. L. C.? A maiden name, perhaps, but that still didn’t feel right. For several pages, the lady only mentioned her work with materia and Chaos theory–whatever that was–the Turks, the names Grimoire and Vincent, but soon enough, he’d turn a page, and all time would stop. She was mentioning other names. Names he knew. Simon. Ifalna.  _Gast_. There were no last names, but the likelihood of another group of scientists with the same specialties all sharing them were astronomical.

She’d worked in the mansion. She wasn’t just a scientist, but a  _Shinra_  scientist. She conducted her research in the basement labs. But… there was no mention of her. Not in any of the books and notes he’d read down there. There was no record of any L. C., only Hojo and Ifalna and Gast and…

_Jenova  
_

For a heart that had stopped beating, his pulse pounded in his ears. The lady wrote about Jenova as a person, but it was clear in context that that was not accurately the case. Jenova was only a project. Jenova was only a cell type. It correlated with the basement records that Jenova was not, in fact, a living, pregnant woman seeking desperately to save her unborn child, and never had been. She, and by extension he, had never been anything but an experiment.

The lady mentioned failed samples in passing, and he knew in the core of his being that she meant Angeal and Genesis. If she hadn’t known them, too, she’d at least known they existed. But then, she would go on to write about the first mentions of taking another chance on creating an Ancient. Personally. And that was where her personal account of the Jenova Project veered wildly away from the clinical notes in the basement.

She was excited and anxious about the prospect of becoming a mother. To see the project spoken of with any emotion at all almost made it seem like she was talking about something else, entirely. Would she be able to continue her work? Would there have to be a nanny? Would Shinra keep his word to leave the rearing to the parents? He seemed to be keeping it to the Rhapsodos and Hewley families so far. If the attempt failed, was she prepared to at worst bury her child, or at best, raise alone a child Simon would forever regard as a failure? Wait…  _wait…_

“Fucking  _HOJO?”_ he’d shouted in the empty house. He would sink to the floor, his long legs somehow folding without ending up in a painful tangle and his  thoughts blissfully unaware of the multiple meanings of the words he’d said aloud. He stared ahead at nothing, for a long while. Hojo had never once mentioned having a child. And he’d known Hojo, for all his life.  _Someone_  would have mentioned it, in the same way that he didn’t have to know the name of Rufus’ mother, to have learned that she was dead. So… how could Hojo have a child, a child with Jenova cells, and everyone on the damned planet had managed to keep it from him–

No.

NO.

His eyes would cut back down to the book in his lap. Dissecting every word would have to wait. He skimmed and flipped pages feverishly. A quick marriage, for the child’s sake. Blessedly vague allusions to the actual trying. The first suspicions that they’d succeeded. The confirmation that she was pregnant. Buying a crib. Talks with the village women. Advice. Encouragement. Gifts. Scribbling out possible names to get a feel for them, but no mention of what they might’ve been. And then, there it was.

_I thought it was too soon to get an accurate sonogram, but the baby seems to be developing a little faster than expected. Small wonder about the sharp pains and everything feeling so tight in the middle. Simon’s so enthusiastic about that, saying it’s early proof that the fetus is adapting well to the J cells, that I had to remind him we tried the ultrasound to see if we could determine the sex yet. He finally stopped and looked again, and it’s a boy. Simon says his name should reflect ‘the greatness of his purpose’. So, Sephiroth, it is. Our own little path to the gods._

A small, damp circle would suddenly appear on the bottom margin of the page, and be joined by another. He wouldn’t have known how to stop them, even if he’d been aware they were falling. He tried for words against a dry throat, with little success, until he barely croaked out ‘ _mother?’_.

He would snap the book closed, with no regard to keeping his place, and hold the splitting leather and yellowed paper tightly to his chest. He had no photo. He had no name. But he had her thoughts, and he had so many things he could know with certainty that she’d touched. It was more than he’d ever had from Jenova. It was overwhelming.

The sky would turn from black to pink before his tears would stop. In exhaustion, he stood on stiff legs and maintained his two-arm death grip on his mother’s journal. The oil lamp was on the verge of burning itself out, but the sunrise was slowly picking up its slack. He took a new look around the bedroom, at his discovered artifacts that were now so much more important than he’d have ever believed, just the night before. Her jewelry. Her books. Her quilt and blanket. Her brush. Her… whatever she did with those scarves in her hair. Her crib.

No.  _His_  crib.

At the very thought, he clutched her journal all the tighter. It seemed impossible that he was ever small enough to have fit into such a thing. After the incubator, he only had memories of sleeping on adult-sized cots and beds, no matter his age. He had grown into everything; only rarely, did he ever grow out of something. His lab clothes and uniforms were always the same. There was no sense of losing a favorite item to being too big to use it anymore. This bed, just for a baby, was truly an alien concept.

The thought would make his heart sink. Of course, it was alien. He wasn’t normal, and he never would be. He was nothing but a…

He paused when the thought wouldn’t finish. He knew the word he’d wanted.  _Monster_. But his heart wasn’t in it anymore. He wasn’t as sure of it as he’d been only yesterday. He remembered the creatures in the reactor’s pods. He remembered Genesis’ words. Everything he’d seen and discovered since Genesis’ desertion. Everything he’d read in the basement.  _Monster_. That was what he’d been so sure of.

But now? He would pull his mother’s journal away from himself, just enough to look at it fully. She was no monster. She was human. Hojo, for all his flaws, was human. Jenova was only an injection. He’d been conceived as human. Born as human. The journals in the basement hadn’t even mention test tubes, when it came to him. His mother’s journal said that she’d married Hojo, that they’d–oh gods,  _they’d had sex_. The one-hundred-percent human way to create a baby, though. When Hojo’s notes spoke of his ‘creation’, that was what they were talking about. He wasn’t an assortment of chemicals, poured into a beaker and mixed together. He wasn’t a seed crystal put into a Mako pod, to see what random growths would form on it.

He would look up to the crib again, and see stitching in a sun-faded green, against other fabrics of yellowed white. He would stand to peer down into the crib, at a tiny pillow that had been waiting there, unused, for twenty-five years. A pillow with his name on it. This was supposed to have been his childhood. Not Mako tanks, or glowing injections, or steel tables, or the constant smell of antiseptics, or fighting live monsters– _real_  monsters–as soon as he could stand on wobbly legs, or being sent to fight a war for reasons he was never important enough to be told of. No. Not at all. He was supposed to be just like Angeal and Genesis. He was supposed to have parents. He  _did_  have parents. One who was already bracing herself to raise him alone, if the other should reject him. He was supposed to be human. That someone fucked that plan up beyond repair did not make him a monster.

But it  _did_  make someone guilty of taking it all away from him. Which one, if there was more than one, he didn’t yet know, but he did know who he was going to start with. If the whole reason he’d been brought into this wretched existence was to find the Promised Land, oh, he’d give the old man a first class, one-way ticket. But, later. There was nothing he could do to Shinra, until he was back in Midgar. There in Nibelheim, he had more immediate concerns.

He would look around the bedroom, at everything within it, and feel an unfamiliar sense of helplessness. The room was by no means cluttered, and yet, there was  _so much_. And he wasn’t going to leave a single bit of it behind. Not her brush, not her bed. But how was he going to carry it all? Where would he even take it? Could he risk leaving anything he’d found behind, on the chance it had been hers? Could he trust the villagers to leave it all alone, now that he’d broken the lock that might’ve been all that kept them out?

Zack. He had to find Zack first. No one knew the lock was broken, but himself. He could take the time to find Zack. Zack had to move from Gongaga to Midgar; he had to know  _something_  about packing. He’d at least have suggestions, whether they would prove to be practical or not. He’d surely been sleeping at some point in the past seventy-two hours, and would have a clearer head.

His own was throbbing with exhaustion. Too much. Too much to learn. Too much to do. Too much to feel. He had his limits, and this once–just this once–he could admit that he was only human, and needed help.

\-------

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this post by risingoflights on tumblr:  
> http://risingoflights.tumblr.com/post/148876437356/playing-my-way-very-slowly-through-the-nibelheim  
> I wrote this in 2016, apparently, which I think was before I got active in posting here. At ~4K words, it's probably easier to read here, so adding it my works properly.


End file.
